Anna passed her PhD dissertation defense from Emory University’s Environmental Health Sciences Graduate Program today! Starting next fall, she will be begin her post-doctoral fellowship with the Epidemic Intelligence Service at the CDC - which is a long-standing, globally-recognized fellowship program, renowned for its investigative and emergency response efforts.

This toolkit provides step-by-step guidance to NTD programme managers and partners on how to engage and work collaboratively with the WASH community to improve delivery of water, sanitation and hygiene services to underserved population affected by many neglected tropical diseases.

This paper reports on an expert meeting convened by the WHO and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation to present five key consensus messages as a basis for wider discussion and debate in the WASH and nutrition sectors.

The design of a parallel cluster-randomized trial assessing the impact of a demand-side sanitation and hygiene intervention on sustained behavior change and mental well-being in rural and peri-urban Amhara, Ethiopia.

Development and application of novel caregiver hygiene behavior measures relating to food preparation, handwashing, and play environments in rural Kenya

Sep 13, 2018

Research Group Updates

September 3, 2019

Matt is currently in Mozambique meeting with project partners on the PAASIM study. Check out the sweet views from this toilet block!

September 1, 2019

Zoe Sakas traveled to Ghana as part of our project in conjunction with SNV. The project is looking to conduct qualitative research to assess rural sanitation delivery programs. Here, she joins the SNV team admiring a latrine in a field.

August 28, 2019

Welcome students! Hope you had a great first day of the 2019-2020 school year.

August 14, 2019

Make sure to science like a champion today! Also, go Atlanta United!

July 7, 2019

As part of the Vaccine Exemplars project, we are conducting focus group discussions with mothers in Nepal.

July 9, 2019

Training of the Vaccine Exemplars research team in Nepal is complete! Here, project manager Anna Ellis, study coordinator Kyra Hester, and MPH student Allison Wray celebrate the end of the training with a group photo.

Congratulations to Ashlin Rakhra (MPH ‘19) for being awarded the Outstanding Practicum Award! Here, is Ashlin accepting the award from James W. Curran, Dean of Public Health at the Rollins School of Public Health.

April 18, 2019

Congratulations to Ashlin Rakhra (MPH ‘19) for being selected as a finalist for the 2019 Outstanding Practicum Award at Emory University! During her practicum, she led a process evaluation of Andilaye programming for a demand-side sanitation and hygiene promotion on sustained behavior change and health in Amhara, Ethiopia.

March 31, 2019

Andilaye endline data collection has begun! This dream team of enumerators, field supervisors, and Andilaye staff (Melkamu and Mulat) will be visiting over 1,500 study households within the next 40 days to conduct surveys on WASH behaviors and mental well-being - as part of the Andilaye Impact Evaluation.

March 20, 2019

Congrats Dr. Chard! Next stop, an Epidemic Intelligence Service fellowship at the CDC!

March 11, 2019

The Andilaye team is conducting another round of refresher trainings with community health volunteers. Here, the health extension workers of an intervention kebele are demonstrating a household counseling visit.

March 4, 2019

Check out that PhD dissertation! Congrats Dr. Delea!

February 25, 2019

Matt, Maryann, and Jed attended an “F in SAFE” strategic technical meeting at the Task Force for Global Health to discuss and propose next steps for a methodology that reliably measures “clean face” in the context of trachoma programs and operational research.

January 21, 2019

Our Andilaye team hosted a regional workshop with Amhara project stakeholders to discuss progress of the intervention in study communities. Here, a health extension worker shares her experience with the intervention activities thus far.

January 3, 2019

Throughout December and January, we visited Andilaye communities to learn more about how the project is being received by influential community members. Here, our project Monitoring and Evaluation Officer Mulat Woreta is interviewing a community police officer at the health post of an intervention community.

December 7, 2018

Bonheur Dounebaine, Kyra Hester, and Robert Bednarczyk traveled to Dakar, Senegal to discuss the Vaccine Exemplars Project with local partners at the Ministry of Health, UNICEF, WHO and others.

November 22, 2018

The Andilaye umbrellas are here! These in-kind umbrellas (modeled by our regional staff: Mulat, Tigist, and Kassahun) will be distributed to the Health Extension Workers and Women’s Development Army Leaders to help shade them from the strong sun as they conduct the Andilaye household counseling visits with caregivers.

September 22, 2018

Matt and staff from the Emory Ethiopia team (Dr. Abebe, Kassahun, Mulat, and Tamiru) enjoy a cup of coffee in Addis as they prepare for the NNN 2018 annual conference. The Andilaye project was highlighted in a WASH-NTD panel discussion during the conference.

PhD student, Frederica Lamar, spent this summer collaborating with a veterinarian at Universidade Eduardo Mondlane in peri-urban Maputo, Mozambique to identify key high risk behaviors contributing to childhood exposure to chicken feces. Here, she is conducting an interview as part of formative research to gain an understanding of the value chain related to chickens.

May 14, 2018

Congratulations to Breanna Wodnik (MPH ‘18) for being awarded the Eugene J. Gangarosa Award for Excellence in International Health! This award is presented to the graduating student who has demonstrated a creative approach to solving public health problems and who shows promise for outstanding service in the international arena.

April 16, 2018

Congratulations to Anna Chard, a PhD Candidate in the group, whose paper on “The impact of WASH improvements on infections disease using serum antibody detection” was accepted asa finalist for Best of UNICEF Research 2018! Anna’s paper shows that dried blood spot (DBS) collection provided objective evidence of disease at a low cost per antigen analyzed, making it an effective measurement tool for the WASH field.

April 12, 2018

Congratulations to Molly Linabarger (MPH ‘18) for being selected as a finalist for the 2018 Outstanding Practicum Award at Emory University! During her practicum, she led a process evaluation of THRIVE II programming for maternal and baby nutrition and WASH in Kenya.

April 5, 2018

25 community mobilization and commitment events in the past 30 days. These events are a key intervention activity to Andilaye and focus on improving action knowledge, barrier identification and planning, and attitudes regarding targeted NTD-preventive WASH behaviours through a form of contextually appropriate and interactive edutainment. The events also initiate the process of shifting social norms through community-generated and managed by-laws and sanctions and public commitment thereof.

The Emory-Ethiopia team is looking pretty sharp in Emory University gear. From left to right it's Yihenew (an Oregon State University PhD Candidate), Resom, Kassahun, and Mulat (Emory-Ethiopia Amhara regional staff). Over the past year, this team has been designing and implementing the Emory-Ethiopia project call project Andilaye (Amharic for togetherness) whose core message is "Together we can be a strong, caring, healthy community."

February 3, 2018

After busy week of field work and meetings with project stakeholders in Kenya, Matt and Jed enjoy a Saturday morning at the Ngong Hills just outside of Nairobi.

January 18, 2018

In January, we kicked off our data collection for the SWASH+ Life Cycle Costing study in 100 schools in Kisumu, Nakuru, Nairobi, and Mombasa counties of Kenya. Here, our data collector Charles Boera inspects a school's latrine block to estimate the cost of repairs.

December 12, 2017

The two-day training for Andilaye household counseling visits have begun. These trainings will take place at in each Woreda (district) involved in the Andilaye intervention (Bahir Dar Zuria, Fogera, and Farta). The trainings are facilitated by Emory Ethiopia Andilaye team members. Health Extension Workers, Cluster Health Center Heads, and the Sanitation and Hygiene Officer and Health Officer will be in attendance from all intervention kebeles (villages). Here, Andilaye team members Siraj and Resom role play a household visit using the household counseling visit flipbook.

July 19, 2017

After presenting their summer practicum projects to THRIVE implementing partner, Homa Hills Community Development Organization, Graduate Research Assistants and 2018 MPH Candidates, Molly Linabarger and Breanna Wodnik, pose for a celebratory picture with our Public Health Program Associate Emily Awino Ogutu in Homa Bay, Kenya.

July 12, 2017

Graduate Research Assistant and 2018 MPH Candidate, Breanna Wodnik, presented on qualitative research methods and electronic data collection to fourth year medical students at Uzima University in Kisumu Kenya as part of her summer practicum and work on the THRIVE project.

May 30, 2017

Behavioral trials for the Andilaye intervention took place in May 2017 in the Amhara region of Ethiopia. The purpose of the behavioral trials is to test out aspects of the Andilaye intervention, from the overarching approach to the activities themselves, in order to determine what does and does not work at changing sanitation and hygiene behaviors in the Amhara context. Here, our behavior change communication specialist Siraj Mohammed is giving a key note address during a community mobilization and commitment event as part of the behavioral trial.

May 22, 2017

Data collectors for Andilaye get ready for another round of household visits by administering mobile survey in pairs. Mobile surveys developed using the freely available Open Data Kit help to improve accuracy and enable immediate availability of results. Our surveys also contain checks and prompts to limit entry errors during data collection.

April 13, 2017

Baseline data collection for Andilaye is complete! Over the course of 37 days, we enrolled 1,589 households that will be followed throughout the next two years to measure changes in NTD-preventive sanitation and hygiene practices (i.e., behavioral outcomes) as well respondent-reported diarrhea and mental well-being in study communities over time. Here, our study manager Jed Snyder and team of data collectors pose for a celebratory picture.

April 7, 2017

The Andilaye team held an intervention design workshop in Bahir Dar, Ethiopia on April 7 and 8, 2017 with key regional stakeholders. Here, our study coordinator Maryann Delea shares a summary of formative research results along with comprehensive problem and solution trees developed from formative research on sanitation, personal hygiene, and household environmental sanitation. Meeting participants partook in interactive activities to review findings and elicit feedback on target behaviors for intervention design. See the meeting report here.

April 26, 2016

Congrats Jennifer Head! For winning the Rollins Department of Environmental Health Outstanding Research Award for her work with CRS in Ethiopia.